I Am Ten
by Barry Eysman
Summary: Man is in love and loves what vanishes" Charles Beaumont


I Am Ten

I Am Ten

By

Barry Eysman

I am ten. It is cold deep end of November. I feel monumentally awful. I am in bed. Under deep quilts. The room is cold, so I need those quilts my grandmother made for me last year. I have a cold that bubbles at my nose and lips. There is Vicks salve for my chest. My grandma rubs it in gently with her gnarled arthritic hand. Her knuckles are greatly swollen and shaped wrong. But she rubs it gently into my chest and it feels cool good.

Not cold bad like inside me. All hot and with fever and feeling cold hot and that makes no sense. Miss Phillips says opposites can attract even if poles apart. I would guess that would mean the North Pole and the South one too. I would imagine she does not mean the barber pole with its revolving strips of summer red and green outside the barbershop. The watching of the pole reminds me of summer when I do not get a cold.

I always get a cold this time of year. Which Mama calls the Deep Freeze, but I like the cold and dark and the snow coming soon, which makes no sense, like poles attracting—could that mean the earth will be squashed flat someday real fast? Or is it happening already real slowly? Like the earth getting bumps in itself like a rug with opposite ends of it being pulled, attracted, to each other? Or would it be like wrinkles on a face getting old? Or the sand getting crunchy and will it be slow enough to do something about it?

Like putting herds of elephants on the north and south poles and then stopping the poles from attracting each other? It's late, almost midnight by my clock on my table by my bed. My clock has been pushed to the edge of the small little table to make room for my box of tissues and the cherry red cough syrup—I hate the taste, but I like the taste of cherries—it seems wrong to make the taste good and then to bad it up—it's like cheating on a test somehow.

I've been coughing for a while. Mom at work. Gramma checking on me in my cold room every so often. I like, when I am not sick, in winter how I can be so comfortable warm under the blankets, like I'm inside a cocoon of summer warm, and my face outside the blankets which are beautifully dark and mysterious with wonderful little space ways curlicues in them and pretty, my face freezing in winter chill, till I have to curl up like a little baby underneath the quilts. And I'm scared.

Which is another thing I like, being scared, which is really stupid, because being scared is no way a good feeling, though I don't like being really really scared, just kinda scared like when I watch Sivad's Fantastic Features on Saturday night when I am allowed to stay up late, and usually I can't sleep for a long time after the movie even when it's crummy and you see the zipper. Sometimes it gives me nightmares like walls closing in on me, like I have trouble seeing the walls at all, though I feel them moving really tightly in, but, it's not like they are glass I see through, it's I don't see anything through them but I see that nothing which is more than I see the walls, though..well..it's mixed up and I feel maybe I might spit up again.

So I lean over and take a bottle of Pepto with that pink color that makes me sick, which is funny since I take Pepto to make me not sick and the color makes me sick. I swallow the sticky full stuff down my throat. It's like swallowing a huge big worm, the thought of which makes me gag, and I mustn't get sick in bed again and I must make it to the bathroom in time and the bathroom is cold with stuff with sharp corners and bad smells and scary like dead, all white and chipped and with cold faucets and cold sink basin and toilet which I'd rather not think about; I wish it was all laid out better, life, I mean.

How we have to do these things that are so embarrassing to stay alive, and I push the top quilt down a bit as the cold runs up my body in heavy p.j.s which reminds me of how it must feel to have a mouse run up you, as I pull the quilt back up quickly and wish it wasn't so dark in here. I wish I could still have my Mickey Mouse nite-lite but Mama says I'm too big a boy for that. I have had this cold for two days. Missed school one day cause that was the day I came down with it and didn't want anyone to know, including me.

Because I can't be out in the cold and crispy days then but I came home all in snuffles and my eyes were watering and you can't fool Gramma, so I was sent to change and then right to bed, but I kind of like this cold in the cold. I mean it's kind of private as I look at my drawn Venetian blinds in my room, which was really the sunroom. It's called that for there are windows in both my walls to the outside. So in summer mornings, when the sun comes in, and the blinds are raised, man, is there a lot of yellow summer sun coming in. But cold in cold—it's like there are soft moccasins inside me, little ones, and they kind of pad me from the outside world. Helping me combat the shiveries.

And they dance little dances inside my skin and bones. It's kind of nice. I remember when I was a young kid, there was a Western on TV, and these scenes of an Indian dance round a campfire. The men were wearing little things round their you know place, so I crawled up to the black and white Admiral, and got on my stomach, and looked up the screen to see if I could see under their—well, I couldn't, but Mama was home that night watching the TV with me and she still kids me about that. Though I don't think it's very funny, she says to people she "just about threw a stitch" when she saw that, and how stupid I was to think that, and I guess I was pretty dumb.

I'm pretty dumb a lot. I get acting crazy in school and the teacher tells me to see the principal and the principal will put his arm round me really scary like and say, "now, always remember, the prince is ur pal" and then he will brush me off like he just touch a fat ugly toad and I am excused.

I don't like the cold but it's like the good cold weather is bringing cold inside me and making me sweat the fever out and I like the fever because in a way, though it makes me feel horrible, it is curled up inside me with the moccasins, like a little kitten keeping watch over me as I drift into feathery sleep that is cancelled by my coughing which makes my throat sore more and I have to take that awful and good cherry syrup, which gives me a kind of a rush, like a cold Coke does on a hot day, but it makes me feel on fire, the syrup, not the Coke, but the Coke makes my throat on fire too because the Coke is so cold—well there you go again—opposites attracting, but if they attract, maybe they don't want to be opposites.

Maybe it's like they try to get together and are made to get together, magnetism and all, but when they do bump into each other, like the North and South Poles, and the world finally squished in between and trying not to think what we'd look like in the squishing, but once poles attract—are there East Poles and West Poles too?—they're together but they just lie there doing nothing, like opposites—boys and girls attract—and though I don't for the life of me see whey they would—it seems the way things are set up with people, though I never met my dad. My parents got a divorce when I was three. Mom says he was a drunk and she sure doesn't like him. So opposites attracted and created –me. I cough in the Kleenex. I am glad I can't see the blood on the tissue, since everything is dark and all. I've coughed up quite a lot of blood actually.

I just put the tissues in the wastebasket gramma has put by my bed. I got a feeling there are other things in the basket too, things I dream about a little tonight—I think they are like tube roses—gramma has a garden each spring and summer and they are her favorites, but I can't stand them, because they remind me of—I better be getting some sleep, it is late and I am tired and I've pulled off all the excess skin from my arms and face and chest that I can and doubt there will be anymore tonight, so I'm just going to hunker down now and get some shut-eye, because I need to think what if the sun and the Earth got that feeling of opposites attracting and we just go whirling into it and just like in a huge pan of bright yellow cake batter like a billion degrees hot, we just go plop, like a cinder on the ground and then no more us. I smile. I find that nice to dream about.

I'll sleep a little and let you get back to me.

"Well, I can't wait." The captain looked down at the sleeping figure.

After removing the chip, the captain sighed as he covered up the extremely old man whose flesh was so corrupted with age and illness that it was like a heavily furrowed ancient gray beach, victim of Earth's madmen's desire to eliminate everything there was. They succeeded. Two ships needled to the stars just in time. Four hundred Earth years ago.

The mummy moaned and struggled with his aching body like papyrus in a finally opened pyramid in a place called Egypt, papyrus caught in the hot desert wind and blown to bits of gray charcoal nothing. The captain unsealed the lock. A door way opened. The captain was now in a hurry. The belt moved the coffin to the chamber. Captain Underwood then pressed the button to close it. When that was done, another push and the coffin excised into deep dark eternal winter Space.

The walls are closing in on me. I wake up. I see the nothing of what is out there. I sneeze again. Gramma comes out of her bedroom. I see her in shadow; she is holding two large tuberoses in her hands directly above me. She is kind. I can trust her. She won't hurt me. Mama hurts me sometimes, but Gramma never does. She is a very old lady my gramma. I can't imagine ever being that old. She leans over. I want some more Vicks salve on my chest. She rubs it in so nice with her crippled scary looking hands. I want some more of the Vicks inhaler for it makes me feel like silver needles of a Christmas tree are coldly in my lungs and it is a good feeling that should be a bad feeling. Again. Opposites. Hurt and nice and scared and cold and hot and me and not me at the same time.

I close my eyes and she brings the tuberoses to my neck and holds them there. The North Pole and the South Pole are making the world go whoosh together and I feel my body mashed together and I want to sneeze and be quiet so Gramma won't be upset and I can take it and I'm ok and I'm okay.

"Dim the lights, Tim." Captain Underwood said. "Let's see what we have."

The entire crew and the civilians on the ship, their very mouths watering, needing memories to feed on, until they could find another planet with life they could devour, each in the huge room watched the memory tapes of the boy with the cold in deep November. The boy was on a giant screen and was being visually scanned atavistically by seven hundred and thirty five persons. But.

They did not sup this evening. There would be no bloated bellies tonight. No harm, really, it's hell on food's bodies to get the most important memory or echoes of others' memories, real ones, dreams, films seen, books read.

There were other expendables, though it takes a while to cure them and get them to the most flavorful, in the lab till they reached a life-supporting planet. The crowd was breaking up, grumbling. Leaving. The captain went to the scientist who practiced the art of giving everyone on this ship, and his counterpart doing the same on the other one, what they desired most. Memories of home. Memories to take place of their own inabilities to have any of the home planet. It is what we do not have…

"Jim, I know he seemed pretty intelligent. And this was just a mistake. But," said the captain, "next one better have something we can use to cure our thirst, or you will regret it."

The scientist nodded. And walked away, head low.

"Man," said Captain Underwood. "THAT was his favorite memory?" He smiled at the weirdness of the human need for the oddest, the silliest, the most forgettable—he threw his hand in the air.

"Well, " he said looking out the porthole to the coffin no longer visible. "You got your eternal winter." Then paused and added, "Moron." Then, tired and hungry, he turned out the light and went to his quarters.


End file.
